Demonstrators And Devout Greet the Pope In Germany

By ALAN COWELL

Published: June 24, 1996

BERLIN, June 23—
On a day intended to evoke his long pilgrimage from Nazi-occupied Poland to the fall of Communism, Pope John Paul II was greeted with protesters' whistles, boos and obscenities as he arrived at the Brandenburg Gate here tonight to celebrate his vision of freedom.

A naked woman protester tried to hurl herself from the crowd on Berlin's Unter den Linden boulevard and witnesses said the glass-sided Popemobile was struck with what seemed to be eggs or tomatoes shortly before the Pope, flanked by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, walked slowly from west to east through the central arch of the Brandenburg Gate.

On the Pope's first visit to a reunified Germany, the short walk was supposed to be a symbolic display of Europe's emergence from decades of cold war division and the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

"The Brandenburg Gate has been occupied by two German dictatorships," the Pope said tonight. "At this place so redolent of history, I feel occasioned to direct an urgent appeal for freedom to all of you here, to the German people, to Europe, which also called for unity in peace, to all people of good will."

Standing at his side, Chancellor Kohl told John Paul, who was a 19-year-old student when the Nazis marched into his native Poland and who later, as Pope, championed resistance to Communism in Eastern Europe: "You never accepted the unnatural division of Europe by the Iron Curtain. You in particular encouraged millions of people who, until a few years ago, suffered under the Communist regime not to abandon hope for a life of freedom."

In contrast to the heady speeches, however, the protesters, interspersed in crowds of papal supporters, seemed likely to encourage the Pope's often stated belief that Europe has emerged from dictatorship and division into a world that holds increasingly little regard for his conservative moral values.

The demonstration was one of the most striking displays of hostility toward the Pope in the 72 trips outside Italy that he has undertaken since he assumed the papacy in 1978. The jeers contrasted sharply with the more familiar jubilation that marked open-air Masses yesterday in the central German city of Paderborn and today in Berlin that drew tens of thousands of the faithful. Some of his followers tonight sought to drown out the protests with choruses of "Hallelujah."

Today's protest was organized by an impromptu coalition of lesbians, gays and leftists opposed to Catholic doctrine forbidding the use of condoms, frowning on sexual liberties and emphasizing traditional roles for women within the family.

The demonstration followed earlier protests in other parts of the city that, according to Georg Cardinal Sterzinsky of Berlin, displayed an "excess of hatefulness."

At one location, around 1,000 protesters, some dressed as condoms, feted a former Hamburg prostitute who identified herself only as "Popess Domenica I" as she conducted a spoof mass to beatify transvestites, mocking the Pope's actions as he beatified two German priests who perished after resisting the Third Reich.

Steffen Zillich, a spokesman for the demonstrators, said the intention was was to "resist the Vatican's attitude to women and to sexual morality."

The protesters, from a so-called "Anti-Pope Council," had initially planned to march right up to the Brandenburg Gate, once sealed off by the Berlin Wall, to confront the Pope with an array of women dressed as cardinals, nuns in pink habits and people wearing condom-shaped hats. But, after the city authorities ordered the protest halted several hundred yards from the huge monument, several hundred demonstrators apparently infiltrated the crowd awaiting the Pope. Some screamed "Go to Hell!" and "Get lost!" as he rode by. Paint bombs were thrown against the roof and door of the vehicle, the police said.

The protests appeared to be a distraction from the principal issue that has confronted the Pope in Germany: Catholicism's ambiguous relationship with Nazism.

For the second successive day, the Pope veered away today from a prepared text to omit passages suggesting stronger Catholic opposition to the Holocaust than many Jews acknowledge.

Indeed, at a meeting with Ignatz Bubis, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, the Pope listed individual Catholics who had fought Nazism but concluded, "There were nonetheless too few who resisted."

Until tonight's demonstration, it was the sense of history that hung over the Pope's appearances here.

His schedule took him first to an open-air Mass for 90,000 worshipers at the same Olympic Stadium that Hitler sought to turn into a shrine to Aryan supremacy in the 1936 games. There, he beatified two German priests -- Bernhard Lichtenberg and Karl Leisner -- who died after opposing the Third Reich. In Catholic procedures, beatification is the penultimate step towards sainthood.

At the open-air Mass in Paderborn yesterday, the Pope seemed to be trying to avoid any offense to Jews and to pre-empt renewed debate about the past when he omitted from a homily a section in the prepared text saying that the "entire" church opposed Nazism.

Today, in the Olympic Stadium, he avoided reading a passage from the prepared text alluding to the wartime Pope Pius XII, whom some Jews have accused of remaining silent as the Holocaust unfolded.

The passage was: "Those who do not limit themselves to cheap polemics know very well what Pius XII thought of the Nazi regime and how much he did to help the countless victims persecuted by that regime."

The Vatican insists that the written text of the Pope's speeches stands as the official record. Pressed to explain the omissions today, the Vatican spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, first said the Pope was under pressure to finish his speeches on schedule.

Then, Dr. Navarro-Valls said the Pope's omissions yesterday were designed to avoid the appearance of a conflict with his words today that "too few" Catholics fought back against the Third Reich -- an assessment publicly shared by Germany's own bishops.

Dr. Navarro-Valls also argued that the Catholic Church's record in the Nazi era could not be properly judged until the Vatican opened its archives at some unspecified future date. "This chapter is still not finished. It is an open page," he said.

Photo: Red paint thrown by a protester stained the window of thePopemobile as Pope John Paul II arrived at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate yesterday. The Pope was booed as well as cheered on the last day of his visit to Germany. (Agence France-Presse)